


Empty Spaces

by spoken



Category: Skins (UK)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-10
Updated: 2014-05-10
Packaged: 2018-01-24 05:13:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1592843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spoken/pseuds/spoken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He left devastation in the spaces he left behind. Effy gathers the ashes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Empty Spaces

**Author's Note:**

> MAJOR SPOILERS FOR S4 & SPOILERS FOR SKINS: FIRE. 
> 
>  
> 
> I watched Skins: Fire and was so mad at many things, as much as I liked seeing the old cast again (Effy, Naomi and Emily happen to be my favourites) and Laura Pulver makes things better generally. Hence, angry plothole-filling fic, filled with personal headcanons that refuse the logic-missing way the show staff dealt with it all. Also major romantic wish fulfilment.

 

 

 

1\. She knows it's bad when they send Tony to break the news to her.

 

2\. Seeing Katie sobbing in front of her is bad. Seeing a pale and silent Karen by chance, months later in the supermarket aisle, is worse. When they go to see Freddie's dad, Anthea has to apologise to Freddie's father for her because the words die in her throat when she sees how Freddie had inherited his nose but, more importantly, the kindness in his eyes, stubbornly existing despite devastation. Freddie's father thanks her too, this tall, broken man standing stiffly straight with trembling hands, and she thinks, wildly, in freefall, that it's the last thing she deserves.

 

3\. Cook gets transferred to a prison halfway across the country and leaves no forwarding address. Naomi goes to visit him sometimes with JJ, when she has the money and the time, which is rare. Naomi asks her, once, if she wants to come along. But Cook is a good person, deep down, and she's the physical embodiment of all he's lost. So she stays away.

 

4\. She doesn't attend his funeral.

 

5\. The lists help. The clean bedroom, organised desk and work flow charts on her walls keep her in order, keep her stitched, more or less, together. But there are days when she looks at them and remembers those unblinking eyes and white lab coat and, when that happens, she has to tear down all the paper she had painstakingly aligned; burn them all; start again, until the system on the walls are hers, and hers alone.

 

6\. The first time they meet, Dominic looks at her in a way that makes her remember the first day at Roundview College, standing around the lockers. When he stammers through their first conversation, she resolves to be kinder to him than she had been, the last time.

 

7\. Sometimes, she's so mad at him she doesn't know what to do with her hands. Sometimes, the need to see him again is a physical ache that catches her in the dark hours of the night, when her nightmares are full of empty streetlights and paintings and open fields filled with yellow flowers and him - tall, lanky, beloved - running, always running, arms waving wildly, head thrown back with the demons or chasing them away; she can't follow him.

 

8\. They don't know it but she catches the look that Naomi and Emily exchange when she brings Jake into their dining room, and then the second one as he gets up to help her with the pasta. Jake is easy to love; all crisp suits, relentless drive and smooth, unruffled manners, with an old-fashioned conservatism about him that she might have found grating on most people but works because he's confident and certain and she's terrified of the precarious mess that is her life.

She never admits this to herself but part of the reason she falls so hard is because, in the half light of the morning on her very first day at Hewitt Morris Asset Management and standing by the window with a coffee, he looked like the man Freddie might have become.

 

9\. The day she catches herself thinking about him as a 'boy' of her past is the day she realises she's forgetting the shape of his lips, the exact colours in his eyes when the sunlight caught it. She takes the day off work and goes back home. Her mother doesn't ask why she's here; just gathers her up, stroking her hair, and lets Effy cry.

 

10\. Emily comes to get her when her one month sentence is up and her tentative smile is the best homecoming present Effy could have wished for. Panda will call at some ungodly hour in the morning from the US and, a few weeks later, Katie will drop by unannounced and hug her while shouting about what a _fucking idiot she is_. Naomi will smile from the couch, arm around Emily, _better_ , and Freddie's notebook will find its way onto the table by her bed, the next time her mother drops by.

 

11\. She thinks of him in dreams, not nightmares now.

 

 

 


End file.
